Halloween drawing treat this year is Dark Version. All suggestions were great and I’m focusing on a common thread that was mentioned (while trying to keep it simple) about the ‘shadowy you’, just like in shows such as Buffy there were these recurring dark-haired, empty-eyed devilish versions of most characters at some point. Transformations may include: occult marks, all sort of weird eyes and visible dramatic veins, changes in clothes and background and the dark hair that’s probably the signature trait for this trope.
(did’t do the dark hair but I’m saving the dark wigs for some of you)
I’ll be receiving photo references over the next few days, please send them at gemeloperverso@gmail.com with the subject Dark Version. As every October, it’s open for all patreon tiers.
In other news, I was very glad to find my own work listed in the context of a talk writer Warren Ellis gave in Leeds about comics (he posted the full text on his newsletter). Here’s this extract:
But webcomics! Webcomics are the global small press.
There was a big gap between the end of the old minicomics scene and the easy production of webcomics. And it was a terrible time. There’s a quote I remember from an American comedian called George Burns, from when all the old vaudeville venues shut down. He said, “Now there’s no place for the kids to go and be lousy any more.” Because most people who do webcomics are lousy. Your first comics are always lousy. I’m still lousy and I’m thousands of years old. But you get better by being printed. And for “printed,” here, you can substitute “uploaded” or “posted.” You can’t see your work properly until it’s some distance in front of you. On paper or on a screen. You won’t see what works and what doesn’t until it’s out in front of you. And your mistakes are more valuable than your successes. I guarantee you that you’ll never see all the things you need to fix until you’ve got a foot or two between you and it.
There’s always been great, important work done in webcomics. I mentioned Allie Brosh. You can add Kate Beaton, Juan Santapau, Paul Duffield and Kate Brown, Emily Horne and Joey Comeau – Natasha Allegri, who made the BEE AND PUPPYCAT show, started out doing webcomics on LiveJournal. I could recite this list forever. But there is also, thank god, a never ending stream of kids who show up to be lousy, and start learning.
The really interesting thing is that you will never see a lot of them in your local comics shop. You’ll see them in bookstores.
It’s a very comprehensive talk about the spectrum and possibilities of comics, and I was reading with interest while having a bowl of soup, even before I saw my name in there and the spoon got frozen mid air for a moment. Also: Warren Ellis thinks these stories should reside in books and bookstores, which is something I’ve been hearing from The Secret Knots readers since forever and I know it’s taking a long to happen. But I’m confident we’ll have good news about it eventually, in a way that’s fair to what you can expect and to the content. In the meantime I’m always glad to have readers online, people who share my work on social media and close backers such as you, to keep the project going and encouraging me to tell the kind of stories I’m interested in, even if they live on the fringe of more traditional genres.
Thanks once again and have a great rest of the week.
J.
